Warts and all by Sam Adams / PHILADELPHIA CITY PAPER / October 28, 2004 Alexander Payne looks like no one's idea of a rebel. In Toronto, rolling through interviews with the world's press corps, Payne sports a crisply pressed dress shirt and mussed hair; in Philadelphia a few weeks later, the 43-year-old director looks like a boarding-school student on weekend leave, striped polo shirt slowly untucking at the waist. In both cases, the first thing Payne wants to know is not what you think of his freshly completed Sideways, but this: Have you seen anything good lately? Sipping sparkling water at the Philadelphia Four Seasons, Payne waxes nostalgic about his "one glorious five-film day" at the Toronto Film Festival. "I would just do that every day," he sighs. When I tell the avowed Fellini fan, who provides the introduction to the new DVD of La Dolce Vita, that I'd caught a screening of I Vitelloni the night before, he winces as if he wishes he'd gone —never mind that would have meant missing the Q&A for his own screening. Payne's enthusiasm for films past and present hardly sets him apart from his American contemporaries, but he's not one to flaunt his influences; a careful viewer might detect a similarity between Vitelloni's Fausto and Sideways' Jack, but Payne's movies have yet to feature a single dancing midget. Likewise, Payne's avowed fondness for 1970s American directors like Hal Ashby and Bob Rafelson manifests itself in a general approach to character and setting, not the studious Malick-isms of David Gordon Green. For Sideways, which follows a pair of middle-aged college buddies into Southern California wine country, Payne and his cinematographer, Phedon Papamichael, watched movies from the 1960s and '70s, focusing particularly on "the colors and the feel, the humanity of those movies." "I just feel so good when I watch them," Payne says, getting a little dreamy again. But homage has no interest for Payne, who told Papamichael "to somehow find a version of that, but not to copy it." To an extent, that meant fighting trends in lenses and film stock towards sharper images and heightened colors, using filters and blending stocks to create a warm, soft approximation of Southern California light. But Payne's main quarrel is not with technology or even studio heads, but with an entire industry geared toward what he feels is the falsification of reality. "In all my movies, I have to work against the makeup department, the costume department, the gaffers," he says. "There's all these forces in motion to beautify things, without asking, 'Is it appropriate to be beautifying here?' I'll catch wardrobe people, assistants who've never worked with me before, going up to extras before a shot and putting a lint brush on them. I'm like, 'What the fuck are you doing?' What's wrong with lint? Or, you're going to have a car in the shot, they clean the car. Where does that idea come from? Why does it have to be clean in order to be photographed?" (It's worth mentioning here that Payne arrives for the interview with a small spot on his shirt front, perhaps an unconscious nod to the cinema of lint.) In the three movies he shot in his native Omaha, Payne was adamant about casting as many native Nebraskans as possible, often using nonprofessionals with the same day jobs as their characters: janitors as janitors, waitresses as waitresses and so on. Even in leading roles, Payne has shied away from using bona fide movie stars who might be touchy about their image, although Jack Nicholson dressed down impressively for About Schmidt. "I don't hire an actor anymore until we have a conversation—'You're not going to wear makeup. Is that OK?'" Payne says. Nothing against movie stars, he insists, although George Clooney is widely reported to have lobbied for Thomas Haden Church's Sideways role, and Payne admits that bigger names could easily have doubled the film's midteens budget. But with greater budgets come greater pressures, and it's clear Payne wanted to take his time making Sideways. In group interviews, the four principal cast members all use words like "relaxed" or "laid-back" to describe the film's two-month shoot, but Paul Giamatti sums it up best: "A lot of the time in this movie was spent on time." Perhaps that's why, like a good glass of wine, Sideways breathes, despite the brisk pace required to turn a 140-page script into a less-than-two-hour movie. Payne told Church and Giamatti to "talk as quickly as people talk in real life," and keep things "highly, highly conversational." The result is a movie that's realistic without flaunting its realism, or as Payne puts it, "very, very, very naturalistic." Payne doesn't quite say it, but Sideways represents a turning point for him, after the "transitional" experience of About Schmidt. Though the characters in Sideways have their foibles, and there's a memorably gonzo sequence involving a cuckolded husband who neglects to don his pants before repelling an intruder, there are no caricatures, no just-for-a-laugh scenes. But if Payne has grander ambitions than making people laugh, he won't admit them—at least not for another decade. "Every film I make, I feel like I'm learning for the next one," he says. "Hopefully some day I'll make a good one. Maybe when I'm in my 50s or something."